Emily, may I ask you a question since you know Photoshop and I struggle
with it? I have made my own actions and have purchased some and I
thought that they were great. Somewhere, somehow they just stopped
working. I have been from PS 7 through CS and now CS3 and the play
action option will not work. I just get the universal slash in the
circle forbidden symbol. Would you have any idea how to troubleshoot
that? Adobe hasn't been much help and forums keep implying that I am
just an idiot, which may be true, but it doesn't help me.
Don
Emily L. Ferguson wrote:
At 4:44 PM -0500 12/22/08, PhotoRoy6@xxxxxxx wrote:
As for a Photoshop action ... given the variety of formats and extra
info that
arrives with many contributions trying to automate the production of
each week's
installment seems not possible. However, elves are ready to listen!
You should have no difficulty creating an action in Photoshop to
resize all the images to a uniform size for the forum. I can email
you two actions to resize to 4x6x96dpi or 6x4x96dpi if you can't
figure out how. But recording actions to make work more efficient it
so important a skill that every student using Photoshop should be able
to do it in their sleep. And Aperture, Elements, Lightroom and
probably most of the others I've never tried, allow some sort of bulk
resizing as well.
If, and this is a big if, the caption info is embedded in the file,
that info would remain in the file when resized. It would then be
there to display in the gallery routine, if the gallery routine pulls
that info from the image file to assemble the thumbnail page.
Again, if your students are not learning to embed File Info into every
file they regard as a keeper, they need to be taught, and hounded
until they do it routinely. It is an essential part of
professionalism in photography now.
Now to generating the gallery - that's probably the biggest problem.
Does the gallery app extract info from the email - like the contact
info, and the footer stuff you put on each individual image?
Presumably it creates the thumbnails? Places the photographer's name
at the top of the large version page? Adjusts the links so they work
the way we've come to expect?
If not, it's time for a geek. A half capable html geek should be able
to create a simple application that would locate all the info from the
emails and put it in the places you want. Then all you'd have to do
is dump the emails on the student who then uses the little app to
assemble the gallery.
But I realize this is the tricky part.
